That's not to say that such shows necessarily contain things that would be inappropriate for your little sister, it's just that they're not specifically intended for little girls to watch. In fact, these kinds of shows often have a sizeable femalefanbase.

The Lyrical Nanoha franchise. Its promotional materials and manga adaptations are printed in Seinen magazines and it began its life as a Spin-Off of the Triangle Heart 3: Sweet Songs ForeverH-Game. The first season even has some fanservice; the next ones less so. In some countries they removed the fanservice and marketed it as a shonen show. They still left all the cases of child abuse by the villains, though. Even though it's a Magical Girl series it's very heavy on the sci-fi and seems more like a Gundam series—intentionally, after one of the writers noticed that Nanoha's Barrier Jacket made her look like a moe Gundam. Later installments take away the Magical Girl elements making it much more obviously aimed at men.

Princess Tutu is a surprisingly dark fairytale despite its cutesy name and artwork - not only that, but the manga is actually a shonen, despite ADV Manga mislabeling its demographic as for 5-10 year old girls.

If you just saw the ending theme for CLANNAD then you would think that it's for very young little girls.

Pretty Face: In one of his omake, Kano talks about how a little girl came up to him at Jump Festa with her mother and told him she loved Pretty Face and got his autograph.

Strike Witches might seem to be for girls judging from the cast, but any of the promotional art should make it clear, from the skimpy outfits and aerial combat, that it is filled with Fanservice all the way through.

When you first hear that Kiss Players is about Transformers powering up by getting a kiss from a human girl, you might think that the series is aimed at young girls. But then when you see the blatant, unrelenting sexual imagery, you think different.

A Little Snow Fairy Sugar is an extremely cutesy show about a young girl who hangs out with cute little fairies who create the weather. It aired at Otaku O'Clock and the manga adaptation was shonen. This is a very odd example, noting that the show itself is very G-rated.

Wandering Son is a Slice of Life centered around kids aging from elementary to high school. The anime has a watercolor style as well. Despite all this it's a Seinen Demographic, and its content delves deeply into gender and growing up in a way more common in works for teens and adults. It's less graphic than a lot of the mangaka's other works though.

Bokura no Hentai has a very cute, almost simplistic art style and the protagonists are mostly middle schoolers. Marika is very much The Cutie with an idealistic viewpoint who basically thinks she's in a 70s shojo manganote Seems she never read Versailles no Bara ... But it's a rather dark Seinen series dealing with anything from puberty to sexual abuse.

Girl Friends focuses a lot on fashion, cosmetics, and other typically girly things, giving people the impression that it's a Shoujo manga. Even the fact that it's a Yuri Genre series doesn't prevent this, since Yuri Genre is popular amongst females too so people just assume that it's meant for a LGBT conscious young adult audience considering how realistically it handles the issues of a budding sexuality. Thus, people tend to be surprised when they discover that it ran in Comic High, a Seinen magazine.

A common stereotype of Axis Powers Hetalia fandom is that it's seemingly made up entirely of yaoi fangirls. On the other hand, it's listed as a Seinen series and has both male and female fans.

Subverted with the Pretty Cure Franchise. It actually IS a franchise meant for little girls... yet at the same time, official marketing papers have 16-40 year old men as a main demographic at the same time. This explains that compared to most other Magical Girl shows (And even other Magical Girl Warrior shows) why it tends to have physical punching and kicking in its fight scenes on a level that would make most Fighting Series blush with jealousy.

Yuki Yuna is a Hero is another seinen Magical Girl Warrior series with Slice of Life elements and a cute art style. It has some fanservice that would be unusual in a series for middle school girls, but it's mostly tame. The series revolves around girls helping people out and has a huge flower motif. A little over halfway through the series it takes turn for the worst that gives Madoka a run for its money. The girls are less Kid Heroes and more Child Soldiers meant to be sacrifices to the World Tree in a slow, agonizing manner. One of the characters even attempts suicide on-screen, and it's said she attempted it over ten times.

Mao-chan is basically a MoefiedEvangelion (minus the more disturbing elements). The "transformation sequences" are more technological than magical and are stylized like military uniforms. Of course, it was written by Ken Akamatsu, so that should come as no surprise.

For that matter, Akamatsu's next work after that, Mahou Sensei Negima!. "Cute 10-year-old boy genius ends up as a teacher at an all-girls middle school" sounds like the premise for a Slice of Life or Romantic Comedy series. Then the first sneezecomes and you realize it's going to be that kind of series. Then you reach volume 4 or so and you realize that it isn't; it's actually a shonen action series (or more accurately, a seinen action series since the fanservice never really goes away) that was designed as a Harem Anime comedy for a couple of volumes because Akamatsu had been pigeonholed by Love Hina and needed to disguise his true intent from his editors.

From the perspecitve of an American, Show by Rock!! isn't tonally any different than any other series about a girl band, a la Jem or Josie and the Pussycats. The truth is that this is actually an attempt by Sanrio to market to young men, and it shows on Otaku O'Clock. The mobile game it's based on, however, has a wide and diverse audience (in Japan, at least).

Sanrio also brought us Aggressive Retsuko, despite the characters looking no different from any other cutesy Sanrio critter, it's squarely aimed at adults and has some content inappropriate for kids. Unlike many examples, it's aimed at adult working women rather than men, however.

Place to Place is a very cutesy, relatively clean slice of life show about a schoolgirl's first crush. Despite this, its manga runs in a seinen magazine, and the anime aired at 1:25 a.m. on TBS.

Magical Play would be easy to mistake as a children's magical girl series, considering its artwork prominently features its young cast and it's categorized under "Kids & Family" by distributor Sentai Filmworks. However, the DVD is rated TV-14, and the show is, in fact, a magical girl parody with fanservice-based humor and some surprising violence.

A movie theater listings website for New York City listed the BanG Dream! 5th Live delayed viewing under "Family", when the series in question is actually aimed at otaku.

Comics

Barbara Slate's Angel Love comic book series of the 1980s, having rather cute cartoonish artwork, yet dealing with serious topics such as drug abuse, abortion, critical illnesses, and incest.

Zig-zagged with The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. The series was originally promoted as if it was aimed at hard-core comics fanboys who were reading it for the character's Ascended Meme status and the many jokes about obscure Marvel continuity, but it has become very popular with actual preteen girls, with enthusiastic support from Marvel-fan geek parents who are happy that their daughters have a Marvel comic to read that is optimistic and morally-uplifting in its tone and not full of sexual Fanservice, graphic violence, and depressing Black and Gray Morality and Downer Ending-filled plotlines. It helps that the fanboy in-jokes aren't obnoxious about rubbing it in non-fanboy readers' faces that they're missing out on anything. Ryan North and Erica Henderson have made it clear that they are completely happy about this and deliberately intended the comic for both demographics.

There's a video of a five-year-old girl singing the "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" line from Labelle's "Lady Marmalade." Presumably the train of thought was "It's about dancing, right? Girls love dancing!" Too bad it's not about dancing, it's about a prostitute, and the line translates to "Do you want to sleep with me tonight?"

One of the group Mosaic.wav's most well-known songs is the ending theme to the very much for little girlsMamotte! Lollipop. So the show's target audience (and their parents) might be a little shocked to find out the band who did the ending theme is mostly otherwise known for doing themes to eroge.

Denpa Song in general is this trope as a musical style. Sickeningly cutesy vocals, ultra happy melodies, and high BPM are all staples of the style, making it seem like the target audience is young girls, but with a few exceptions like the above mentioned Kyun Kyun Panic and some songs from PriPara, denpa is made by and for adults in the otaku subculture, and some contain lyrics inappropriate for kids. And, unfortunately, some even have inappropriate lyrics about kids. There is of course some crossover appeal, especially with more mainstream acts like dempagumi.inc.

The Spice Girls. It's hard to tell exactly how much of their "Girl Power" theme was serious, and how much was self-parody, but their lyrics make it clear that it was at least about sexual liberation... to the dismay of the parents of the 8 year olds who would parrot the lyrics.

Back in The '90s, "Barbie Girl" by Aqua was all the rage with young girls... Despite containing lyrics like "undress me everywhere". Mattel did end up making a Bowdlerized version for their Barbie commercials, however.

Melanie Martinez dresses in sweet lolita-style attire in soft colors. Her voice is sweet sounding and she has songs with names like "Teddy Bear", "Sippy Cup", "Milk And Cookies", and "Dollhouse". She must be kid friendly, right? Nope. For example, "Dollhouse" is about a dysfunctional family trying to keep the facade of a happy family despite the fact the dad cheats, the son uses drugs, and the mom drinks to ignore her husband's infidelity. Even her most PG songs like "Pity Party" are about stuff like having a breakdown because no one came to your birthday party. Most of her songs have heavy amounts of Lyrical Dissonance.

Theater

There are a lot of little girls who love Waitress, despite it having cursing, sexual scenes, and adult themes that would go over a kid's head (like a song about pregnancy tests).

A cute game about pop stars! With catchy songs, cute dresses and tons of accessories to dress up. But the target audience is otaku, with overpriced DLC no young girl (or most adults) can afford. Worth noting though is that Bandai-Namco attempted to get girls into the series with articles about Dearly Stars in girls magazines and the addition of a boy band, but it never really caught on. Once their other idol game series actually intended for young girls, Aikatsu!, became popular, they stopped trying to market iM@S to girls. Or at least LITTLE girls.

The male-focused spinoff game THE iDOLM@STER: SideM is targeted at girls... Teenage girls and young women, though, not little girls. It's an Idol Game with Otome Game elements.

You'd be surprised at how many clueless parents get Neptunia games for their young daughters. You'd think the Cleavage Windows front and center and the T (M in the case of mk2) rating would be enough... Though it's much more understandable with re;birth 1 and Producing Perfection, which feature modest costumes and very bright colors on the box.

What makes Producing Perfection all the more troubling is that alphabetically it is placed right next to the still T-rated (3+ in Europe) but more family friendly Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA games in store displays. Considering Hatsune Miku has a lot of young fans, all it takes is a confused parent who has a child that's into Vocaloid and difficulty remembering long game names seeing two vita games with an anime Pop Idol on it, pick the wrong one and give their ten-year-old girl a game that gives you points for upskirt shots, has risque dialog pushing the envelope, and even has nude scenes. Not to mention, a lot of parents dismiss T ratings in rhythm games due to "family" games like Rock Band having the same rating. That's not to say that the ten-year-old wouldn't enjoy the game.

Touhou is a Video Game series about little (looking) girls firing colourful dots, arrows and lasers at each other, with almost the whole cast being some kind of Elegant Gothic Lolita (if only as far as clothes go in most cases). Except the games are one of the most famous examples of Bullet HellShoot 'em Up, even if Cute 'em Up is in full swing. Suffice to say, despite the bright and cheery appearance the games have loads of complex characters, comparatively difficult plots and are just Nintendo Hard through-out, so they are definitely not for little girls. Even the various manga and other literature tend to be rather dark and depressing despite the initial appearance, sometimes even going as far as being outright scary or visibly violent. That said, despite all this, the series has a huge Periphery Demographic of children (both boys and girls), although many of them don't play the games. Many kids attend Reitaisei with their parents and ZUN once received a hearfelt fan letter from an elementary school girl.

Medabots is a kid friendly franchise. When it was announced they were making a game called Medabots Girls Mission fans thought it was a female-aimed installment aimed at little girls. It's actually a Hotter and Sexier 15+ rated game with Clothing Damage on its female protagonists and lots of blatant fanservice.

Webcomics

minus is a brightly-colored cute-looking webcomic about an omnipotent little girl, albeit with a ton of Fridge Horror, but if TV Tropes is anything to go by, most of the people who read the comic are men.

Web Original

The Most Popular Girls in School is a stop-motion show using mainly Barbie dolls and starring high school girls. It's also incredibly vulgar, sexual, and full of profanity.

It's popular to make videos involving Littlest Pet Shop toys however just because the toys are aimed at little girls doesn't mean the fan-vids are. LPS: Popular is explictly aimed at the middle school and high school crowd more than it is eight year olds.

Making Fiends is actually a relatively dark cartoon about attempting murder with demons, and the colors are anything but bright, pastel or pink. But the two main characters are young girls. The original web animation was for a neutral demographic, but the daughter of a Nickelodeon producer loved it, and so Nick made a deal with Amy Winfrey to turn it into a cartoon. If you look at any of the message boards for Making Fiends, you'll see that male fans are extremely rare, though the show has gotten positive reviews from many male critics. Considering Nickelodeon only aired six episodes of the show back in 2008, it could just be that people in general, male and female, haven't had a chance to see it.

Steven Universe has a majority female cast, is all about family and friendship, has quite a bit of romance, and uses bright colors (even the protagonist has a pink theme, though he's male). It's aimed at a unisex audience and contains quite a few Shout Outs to older Magical Girl anime that younger fans probably wouldn't pick up on, and it's clearly going for Multiple Demographic Appeal.

Star vs. the Forces of Evil is a Magical Girl parody but it's aimed at an unisex demographic. However, by the middle of the second season, the plot and drama can get a little heavy with themes of fantasy racism (humanoids vs monsters), conspiracies and moral dilemmas but still keeps a goofy and comedic tone for the non-plot heavy episodes, so it a mixed bag.

Community

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